Space Scoop

Here you can read the latest Space Scoop, our astronomy news service for children aged 8 and above. The idea behind Space Scoop is to change the way science is often perceived by young children, as outdated and dull subjects. By sharing exciting new astronomical discoveries with them, we inspire children to develop an interest in science and technology. Space Scoop makes a wonderful tool that can be used in the classroom to teach and discuss the latest astronomy news.

3 October 2011: Welcome to the star-studded premiere of the most complex telescope on Earth: ALMA! To celebrate the launch of ALMA, astronomers have released the first photo taken by the telescope, which shows a pair of galaxies called the Antennae Galaxies.

29 September 2011: To see the Universe in full, astronomers have to get creative. They combine multiple photos taken by different telescopes to make one colourful picture. For example, in this beautiful new picture of a star-forming cloud, the space telescope called Chandra only captured the purple regions. Meanwhile, another space telescope called Spitzer saw things a bit differently when it observed the same cloud – everything shown here other than the purple bits!

28 September 2011: If you were playing the card game Top Trumps about the different types of stars in the Universe, you would definitely want a Yellow Hyper-Giant star in your hand. Just take a look at the stats for the Yellow Hyper-Giant shown in this photo: It is about 20 times heavier, 1000 times wider and it shines 500,000 times more brightly than the Sun! You would be incredibly lucky to be dealt a card like this, though, as Yellow Hyper-Giant stars are very rare.

13 September 2011: Some places on Earth are extreme: the North and South Poles with their freezing temperatures, the deep sea where sunlight cannot reach, and the inside of fiery hot volcanoes. But none of these regions come close to comparing to the harsh conditions found on some other planets in the Universe.

12 September 2011: Our Solar System contains a wonderful mix of planets: small and rocky worlds like the Earth and Mars in the inner region, and Gas Giants, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which are found further out. Astronomers are keen to find out if other solar systems in the Universe are similar to ours. Now, an exciting new discovery of 50 planets around distant stars is helping astronomers to answer this question.

31 August 2011: It’s great that the Earth’s atmosphere blocks harmful radiation from space, such as X-rays, from reaching the ground – we couldn’t survive without it! But astronomers would like to study this radiation because it gives them useful information about objects in the Universe, such as stars and galaxies. So what can they do?

24 August 2011: It isn’t often that astronomers look into space and see another pair of eyes staring back at them, but that’s what we have here. These aren’t the eyes of an alien, but a pair of galaxies nicknamed ‘The Eyes’ because they look like a pair of white eyeballs glowing in the dark! (To see both ‘eyes’ you have to click on the picture.)

17 August 2011: What do you think astronomers call the green thing in this photo? If you guessed “blob”, then you’re right! Well, if we’re being technical, the full name for this type of object is a “Lyman-alpha blob”.

3 August 2011: Like a team of real-life Indiana Joneses, scientists have explored our galaxy and found a treasure trove of hidden gems. These gems are much more spectacular than the diamonds that Indiana Jones might hope to find – they are collections of dazzling stars!

27 July 2011: This beautiful photo was taken with a new telescope called the VST. It shows three galaxies that are known as the Leo Triplet. (Click on the photo to see all three galaxies.) Large telescopes can normally study only one of these galaxies at a time. But the VST can get all three members of the group in a single picture!

21 July 2011: The Earth has lots of man-made satellites that orbit our planet. But it only has one natural satellite: the Moon. Our galaxy – the Milky Way – also has some natural satellites that orbit it. These satellites are called ‘dwarf galaxies’ because they are much smaller than normal galaxies like ours. Funnily, astronomers have named one of the dwarf galaxies that orbits our galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud!

6 July 2011: Did you know that everything on Earth is made of stuff from stars? If you could look at the world around you with a super-powerful microscope, you would see that everything is made up of tiny things called atoms. Today we know about more than 110 different types of atoms, with hydrogen being the most common atom in the Universe.

29 June 2011: Astronomers can look back in time to when the Universe was younger. But they don’t have to hop into a time travel machine to do this, like in a sci-fi movie. Instead, all they need are powerful telescopes to look at objects that are far away in the Universe, because when we look at space we are looking at the past!

23 June 2011: Stars come in different colours and sizes. This new picture shows the famous Red Giant star called Betelgeuse (you say the name as “Beetle-Juice”). The star looks small in the picture – just a little red circle at the centre. But Betelgeuse is actually huge: If you replaced the Sun in our Solar System with this star, it is so wide that it would reach as far as the planet Jupiter!

22 June 2011: It’s hard to picture just how big the Universe is. For instance, the Earth seems like a big place to us, but you could fit about one million Earths inside our nearest star, the Sun. And the Sun is just one of billions of stars that make up our galaxy, which is called the Milky Way. When you think about how the Milky Way is just one galaxy in a group of about 40 nearby galaxies, the Universe is starting to seem like a big place!